


Til They Beg for Sweet Damnation

by thereweregiants



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mission Fic, Offscreen Dubcon/Noncon, Post-Fall of Overwatch, offscreen death of Overwatch characters (who are minor in the fic), technically I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:02:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26116894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereweregiants/pseuds/thereweregiants
Summary: Trying to take Talon down once and for all, Jesse goes in undercover.Just because you get in, of course, doesn't mean you'll come out again.
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 16
Kudos: 34





	Til They Beg for Sweet Damnation

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you gotta be mean to your faves  
> most abuse and death takes place offscreen
> 
> title from [The Pogues' The Rake at the Gates of Hell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu3t7dHN2CM)  
> written mostly to a lot of Glass

“It’s too risky.”

“It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”

Jack and Jesse stare at each other until Ana says, tiredly, “Jack, do we have any better options?”

He turns and walks away, pacing the best he can in the small space. His eyes fall upon his visor and mask, and Jack wishes he were wearing them so the others couldn’t see the sour look he’s sure is on his face. He turns back, to where Ana is sitting on a cot and absently stroking the barrel of her gun and Jesse is leaning against a wall chewing on a cigar, eyes lazy and fingers tapping at his belt like they’re not talking about throwing him to the wolves.

Finally Jack sighs, leather creaking as he crosses his arms. “What makes you think you can get in, in the first place?”

Jesse’s face is still bland, but now Jack can see the fear, the sorrow that tightens the corners of his lips.

“Because for all he pretends he’s not, it’s still Gabriel in there.”

Unsaid is what Jesse has always, will always, mean to Gabriel.

Even now.

-x-x-x-x-x-

They don’t hear anything from him for weeks. 

There’s a phone call, all of thirty seconds long, left while Jack was killing some idiots with more weapons than brains in Florida. I’m okay, Jesse says. His voice sounds cheerful enough but they can hear faint screams in the distance.

After that it’s radio silence.

Jack and Ana keep up the same routines - killing off all the groups and gangs they never were able to when they wore blue. When they had restrictions. Always, always, they keep their eyes out for Talon, where they might be and what they might be doing.

Overwatch, or at least the people who are calling themselves that now, keep reaching out to them the best they can. Jack ignores them easily. It’s harder for Ana, especially once she finds out that they’ve been talking to Fareeha.

Jack asks her if she really wants her daughter to know if she’s alive. If she wants her to know what she’s really been doing. The black eye is worth it in the end, and Ana goes off to kill some more.

Two months in, Jack is perched on a rooftop of an abandoned building, watching Talon raid a mining processing facility. He’s not sure what they’re looking for, probably either gold or cobalt, something to power their -

Wait.

For a moment he feels like he’s thrown fifteen years in the past, looking down at two figures turned towards each other and arguing, one wearing what he could swear is a Blackwatch uniform. 

Jack waits until the figures separate before silently descending to ground level. He only has to wait a minute before he’s wrapping a gloved hand across a mouth to silence, his other arm tight around a broad chest. They stumble backwards until they’re far enough back that they can’t be seen from outside.

“Fuckin’ Christ, Jack, let me go!” Jesse’s voice is muffled but clear.

Jack lets him go, only to shove Jesse back against a wall. “Two  _ months, _ McCree. We’d nearly given you up for dead.”

“Yeah, well. Didn’t happen.” Jesse brushes himself off, but it seems to be more for appearance than anything. 

Frowning, Jack looks him over, pulling off his visor for a better look. On a second glance his uniform isn’t Blackwatch, but it’s a close cousin - black and red and designed by someone who had seen the original. Jesse’s hair is longer than Jack’s ever seen it, though his beard is neatly trimmed. Neither manage to hide his sharp cheekbones, nor how his face is narrowed nearly to the point of gauntness. 

There’s something wrong that Jack can’t put his finger on, until he realizes there’s no cigar jammed in his mouth.

“No cigar?” he finds himself asking, like it matters.

“Moira doesn’t like it,” is the reply and it comes out flat, rote, like a child reciting a rule that’s been beaten into him.

Jack blinks. Moves on, because they don’t have time. “We need to talk, sometime that you’re not in the middle of battle.” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out what looks like a tiny silver gun. “Open your shirt.”

Jesse eyes the injector with trepidation, backs up with his hands in front of him. “I dunno what that is or where you think it’s goin’, but it’s not in me. I get scanned all the time.”

“It’s untraceable, no metals. Just a locator, with no active broadcasting.”

Against the wall now, Jesse is still staring at the injector with narrowed eyes and thin lips. “It’s a bad idea.”

“A bad idea is not being able to contact you for two months and not knowing if you’re dead or have intel. This is all useless if we can’t talk. Now open your goddamn shirt, it needs to go into your side.”

Jesse stays against the wall so Jack steps forward and yanks at his chest armor with a growl. It comes loose easily and Jack pushes up Jesse’s shirt before stopping abruptly. 

“McCree.”

Looking past Jack’s shoulder, Jesse’s eyes are blank. “Don’t worry about it.”

There are deep, deep bruises, some fresh and others faded. Some look like boot prints, others obviously made with fists or harder objects. Jesse doesn’t move as Jack pushes his shirt up farther, showing more of the same, plus what looks like small burns scattered here and there. There are fingerprint marks pressed deep around his throat, and when Jack sets his hand to them the span is far, far larger than his own.

“What have they been doing to you?” Jack hates the sound of quiet horror in his own voice, hates that Jesse has to hear it.

“What do you think Talon does to people they think are trying to spy on them?” Jesse asks in response, finally meeting Jack’s eyes. “They believe me now.”

Jack doesn’t look away as he presses the injector to Jesse’s side and it injects the microchip with a soft puff. It really should be going into cushioning fat, but Jesse’s shaved down to ropy muscle and visible ribs. Which is worrying on some level deeper than the injuries.

He smooths down Jesse’s shirt, unable to help the gentleness of his fingers. “We’ll be in touch,” Jack says gruffly. “Keep an eye out.”

Jesse fastens his chest armor back up and Jack puts his visor back on and the two go their separate ways. Jack ends up back on the rooftop, watching the figures below march back and forth with purpose. 

His eyes get stuck on two figures in stark black, how the one in the cape draws the other close with a possessive arm.

Fading back into the shadows, Jack wonders if any of this was a good idea.

-x-x-x-x-x-

A meeting is set up, a few weeks later.

It’s a tiny cafe in Florence, where there’s an even smaller room in the back used for quiet meetings. Jack is wearing tourist gear, looking like the bumbling old American he is. Jesse’s clothing is - bland, looking like it came out of a costume box labeled ‘blah’. Jack didn’t realize how much of Jesse was recognizable in his attire until it’s not there anymore.

Jesse looks all right, on the surface. Too pale, except for where his mouth is red and burst open, like he was just punched. Lips oddly swollen and obscene where everything else is so pointedly drab that it makes Jack uncomfortable and unwilling to look Jesse in the face. “What do you have,” he says, clearing his throat.

He wastes no time, setting out a tablet that projects blueprints with a touch. “Talon headquarters, usual setups for most of their facilities, some breakdowns of armor for infantry,” he rattles off before Jack can take a breath. Despite the questions he has, Jack leans forward, eyes sharp and intent.

After long minutes of scrolling and absorbing, Jack sits back. “This is excellent work.”

Jesse nods shortly, stands up. “Anything else?”

Jack stands as well, a frown on his face. He puts a hand out but before it can get anywhere near the goal of Jesse’s arm, the other man is across the room. He frowns harder. “How are you holding up?”

At first and even second glance Jesse looks better - he’s put on some weight, he seems to be standing without pain. Jack still can’t get over the feeling that something is wrong, though, something deeply off about the man that he can’t put his finger on.

When Jesse doesn’t answer Jack steps closer, notes how Jesse steps away so smoothly it’s barely noticeable. “Are they still hurting you?” he finds himself asking before he can think about it.

Jesse finally meets his eyes, and the spark, the shine that was always Jesse McCree is muted. Greyed out, even as his eye color hasn’t changed. “I told you, don’t worry about it,” he says with a quirk of his too-red lips.

Soon Jesse is against a wall, eyes looking past Jack. “Let me see,” Jack says quietly. Jesse doesn’t respond, not even when Jack is close enough to feel the heat of his body, is close enough to push Jesse’s shirt up.

The old bruising is gone but there are different marks now. More - clinical. Tiny round purple haematomas with pinpricks in the center for injections, neatly marching rows of stitches. What looks like faded ink, marking dates. Boundaries.

He wonders what the rest of Jesse’s body looks like now.

Jack puts his hand to Jesse’s side, where the muscle underneath the skin is mushy and Jesse finally reacts by wincing slightly. “Don’t -”

“McCree.”

The only sound in the room is ragged breath in Jack’s ear. It stops, hitches, starts up again. “They trust me now,” he says, ever so quietly.  _ “He _ trusts me now.” 

Jack takes another step forward, until he’s so very close. His hand slides around to support Jesse’s back, but Jesse’s shaking his head. 

“I can’t.” A sharp breath, then: “If I do, I won’t go back.”

“This is good information,” Jack says, as gently as his harsh voice will allow. “You don’t need -”

“You don’t know what they do, what they are. You need more. You need to destroy them.” A fluid step to the side and Jesse is out of arm’s reach. He holds a card out, black with holographic purple writing glinting on it. “She can help. She’s...Talon, technically, but. If you have the money, she’s trustworthy.”

Jack looks down at the card with the shiny purple sugar skull and by the time he looks up, Jesse’s gone.

-x-x-x-x-x-

He doesn’t trust Sombra.

She doesn’t trust him, either, so that works out. 

Sombra knows exactly who Jack is, exactly who Jack was. He’s fairly sure she knows parts of his biography that he’s long forgotten by now. It takes pulling every strand he can to get the name Olivia Colomar, but the sheer savage joy that sweeps over him when he watches her face change is worth it.

Sombra doesn’t trust Jack, she works for Talon when it suits her, but she likes Jesse.

Neither of them explain it but Jack can tell an old friendship when he sees it. If Jesse wasn’t involved he’s pretty sure Sombra would sell Jack out to Talon in an instant, but every time they mention Jesse, Sombra will - pause. She’ll get a faint line between those carefully sculpted brows of hers and she’ll start being less flippant, more serious.

Jack wishes she liked him more, he’d ask what she was worried about. If she saw the same things Jack did, if she saw more. If she saw worse.

Instead he just hands her a stick with untraceable credits and a request for anything on the Talon surveillance system. She takes it with a cool nod and Jack knows that any delay in the information will be because she feels like it, not because she doesn’t have it.

Before he even has to think about that mess, Jack gets word from Jesse that he’s going to be out on his own on some mission. He’ll be at a Talon safehouse, and Jack has to scoff when he sees where it is.

Talon, his ass. That used to be Blackwatch. Jack had approved the funding for it.

Jesse meets him at a hotel a few blocks over, one that Jack hit with an EMP the day before with his own equipment safely out of the way. If anyone was spying on him it wasn’t going to be through electronic means. If the hotel had issues doing just about everything while recovering from their electrical system being knocked out, well. That’s why Jack brought cash.

Arriving with a duffel bag in hand, Jesse wastes no time in pulling out information on troop movements and new buildings, explaining them all shortly as he passes them over to Jack. Jack nods, absorbs, but keeps half an eye on Jesse as he talks.

He’s worn away, it seems like. His tan has faded even farther, making his hair seem darker and the grey hairs scattered throughout brighter. The neutral, boring clothes he wears are starting to look disturbingly natural on him. When Jesse looks up to check if Jack is following, it’s with all the enthusiasm of someone giving an office presentation.

Jack dutifully watches and reads, scans everything and sends it to Ana as they go through it. When they’re done he watches Jesse repack his bag, minus the papers he’s leaving with Jack.

“It’s safe here,” Jack says quietly, and Jesse stills. “No one in Talon or Overwatch to be seen, hit it with an EMP myself.” He waits for a long moment, for a response that doesn’t come. “If it won’t get you in trouble you can stay the night. I’ll keep watch.”

The old Jesse McCree was always too good, too careful to give anything away. The Jesse in front of Jack tightens his hand where it’s fisted around the handle of his duffel, until the bones shine white through thin skin.

Jack gestures at the bedroom and attached bathroom. “Take a shower,” he says gruffly. “Sleep.” After a moment, he adds, “No one is watching.”

He watches as Jesse’s eyes go to the door, watches as he visibly struggles with himself. Finally Jesse lets the bag go. Avoids Jack’s eyes but pauses and gives a short nod before going into the bedroom. 

A minute later the sound of the shower turns on, and Jack locks the suite door and shoves a chair under the handle before standing silently in front of the windows and watching the street below.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jack silently opens the bedroom door when he hears noises from behind it.

Covers are thrown back, twisted along the bottom of the bed. Jesse is flat on his back, arms and legs snapped vertical like they were aligned with a ruler, fingers and toes digging in and tangled tightly in the flat sheet like he’s being held there. Sweat shines on his forehead, collarbone, stomach where his shirt is rucked up. 

Jack hesitates until he hears another noise rip its way free from Jesse’s throat. Something soft and muffled, something animal-like and hurt. Jack finds himself sitting on the edge of the bed before he knows it, reaching a hand out.

He’s good at this, at soothing nightmares. Those early years of SEP, dealing with the aftermath of - everything, was what brought him and Gabriel together.

Smoothing sweat-damp hair back, Jack’s eyes fall on black fingerprint bruises with scabbed clawmark tips sunk deep into Jesse’s hips, into his shoulders, and knows that Gabriel is on the other side of the situation now. 

Jesse doesn’t seem to know Jack is there, holds himself rigidly like he’s strapped down. He clenches his fists in the sheets until the thin, scarred skin over his knuckles breaks open and sluggish blood trickles down to stain the sheets. Tendons stand out on his legs, making the dark abrasions on his knees shift over the bone beneath. 

Jack helplessly traces a calloused thumb across the fragile skin of Jesse’s temple and doesn’t wake him.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jack shouldn’t have sat down to tea with Ana and Angela. Every goddamn time he dares to relax, something bad happens. He’s started to eye books and televisions and restaurants with suspicion - if he ever dares to indulge it’s sure the world is falling apart somewhere close by.

This time it comes in the form of a call from Sombra on his tablet. It doesn’t matter that it had been powered off, it rings at its highest volume as Ana rolls her eyes and Angela looks offended, before Ana’s tablet starts ringing as well. 

He can’t even get a word out when he answers before Sombra’s yelling at him to get here now, she’ll send the coordinates and there’s no time to explain, he should maybe bring the doctor too. And weapons, lots of them. Jack and Ana glance at Angela, who nods tightly and starts typing something on her own tablet, murmuring something about a friend who could help.

Sombra pulls strings, gets them on an atmospheric craft within the hour. They stop by an airstrip in Morocco, picking up a young, good looking man with short dreadlocks and oversized boots. He and Angela speak quietly in French for a moment before he introduces himself. Baptiste, former Talon, associated but not fully part of Overwatch, old friend of Sombra. Apparently he knows Angela, as well. He seems to be aware of what’s going on, continually checks his guns and aid kits with calm dark eyes and steady hands.

Jack doesn’t like surprises, but he likes even less not having enough firepower.

When they’re close he gets another call from Sombra that they all crowd around to listen to. Apparently Talon’s headquarters in rural Italy is under attack - Doomfist and Maximilien had some sort of disagreement and now Null Sector has gone mad and taken over half of Talon’s omnics. Jack can only appreciate his various enemies taking each other out, and if this is a chance to slip in and put down some of Talon’s inner circle, well, so much the better.

When they get there it feels like it should be - momentous. Instead, it’s just a battlefield like any other. Their objectives, decided on the plane, were to take out any high ranking members they could, place explosives at certain coordinates Sombra provided them with, and - for Jack at least - to get Jesse out.

Jack says flat out to avoid Gabriel. Baptiste nods a bit too quickly at that and Jack wonders what he’s seen. It’s not sentimental, not really. Jack remembers every agonizing moment of recovering from the shotgun blast to his back, and they just don’t have the time for it right now.

They land and split up, quickly blending into the chaos. Jack places his explosives along the outside of the facility before slipping inside. Most of the power is out, so he turns his visor on, the world painted in shades of blood-red as he silently pads through the hallways.

Inside a confusing, mazelike warehouse space full of boxes, he spies Ana crouched behind a metal contraption. Before he can say anything, she gestures for silence before tapping her missing eye. Lacroix. He nods, and after a further series of hand signals, he throws a flashbang up into the darkness of the warehouse ceiling as Ana scurries to a new position, throwing another after hearing Lacroix fire at where Ana isn’t. 

Jack moves on.

He turns off his visor as the hallways become bright and steel-coated, clinical in their starkness. Jack tilts his head as he hears something - pain, but not that of battle.

Wordless screams from a throat that has nearly given out, pure mindless pain.

Jack undoes the straps of his pistol, uneasy. He moves silently down the corridor until he reaches a door with a familiar name on it that makes his lip lift in an unconscious sneer. Studying the door lock, he pulls out...something that Sombra had given him, pressing it next to the handle and stepping back dubiously. The door unlocks with a soft click, and Jack shrugs. He pulls the surprisingly heavy door open as quietly as he can, taking a few careful steps in.

“Just set it to the side, please, and  _ not _ on top of the sterile field this time.” There’s a clink of metal, and the sound of something sizzling. The screaming has died down to whimpering, now.

“What are you doing, Moira?” Jack asks as he warily takes a few steps forward. He can’t quite see what’s happening yet.

A red head clad in a plastic face shield turns, just enough to see Jack. “Hello, Commander. It’s been a while.”

“Moira.” He’s circled around enough to see what’s before her. The layers that are spread out, the separated veins and arteries suspended in the air. For all the bare muscle and flayed skin, it’s surprisingly bloodless. “What are you doing.”

Moira bends back down, does something with a metal pen whose til glows white. Faint smoke rises from the flesh and Jack inexplicably thinks of his father’s Sunday barbeques. The memory vanishes as soon as Jesse makes a soft noise of pain deep in his throat, shifting in his restraints. Moira pats his shoulder with an absent gloved hand. “Hush, dear.”

She cocks her head, looks up at Jack. “If you want to know how something works, you have to take it apart,” she says, like explaining something to a small child. “As soon as,” she waves a hand through the air, “All this ridiculousness is sorted out, we’re putting in production on new omnics. No more big slabs of metal, these will have the thinnest of connections, the elements moving like, well.” She taps at a carefully separated nerve and Jesse weakly turns his head to vomit off the side of the table. “Like the human prototype.”

Jack pulls out his pistol, unable to take any more. “Put him back together. Now.”

Moira rolls her eyes. “To start with, no. You can’t always fit the puzzle back together again, Commander. Secondly -”

“Doomfist is dead.” Jack waves his tablet at her, with proof of death sent to him by Baptiste. “Same with LaCroix, de Kuiper, Korpal. Maximilien, of course. Talon is gone, Doctor, eaten by its own hubris. This place is going to come down around our ears in less than half an hour. So -”

“And Gabriel?”

Jack grits his teeth. “And I repeat, this place is going to fucking blow up, Moira. Put Jesse back together so I can get him out of here and maybe you won’t go the same way as your fellow council members.”

Moira’s eyes narrow but before she can respond, red blooms at her shoulder and she topples off of her seat. Jack whirls around to see Ana snapping another round in her rifle, with Angela close behind. “Detonation in eleven minutes, Jack,” Ana says, as she goes after a scrambling Moira.

Angela is checking Jesse over, eyes narrowed and chewing on her lips. Finally she spins and starts poking through the instruments left under the sterile field that Moira had mentioned, snapping a pair of gloves on as she goes. She has a tourniquet tied around Jesse’s upper arm in moments, before she says “I need you to dislocate his elbow.”

“What.”

“I don’t have time to explain but we can’t save his lower arm. You need to pull it apart so I can cut the tendons.” Jack nods helplessly, head jerking to the side as Moira and Ana crash into a glass cabinet across the room. “Commander!”

Jack shakes his head, gets back into the game. He digs his fingers into Jesse’s bicep below the tourniquet - his other hand hovers in the air. Everything is...dissected, rubbery veins and white bone laid bare. 

“It doesn’t matter what you grab, I’m cutting it off in a minute anyways,” Angela says, and indeed there’s what looks like a tiny plasma cutter in one hand. Jack swallows hard before threading his fingers through the gap between radius and ulna and  _ pulling. _

Jesse howls in pain as the bones pop apart. Angela quickly cuts two semi circles of skin that she then pulls back, before cutting through the thick tendons that are now the only thing holding his arm together. Jack has to use a surprising amount of his enhanced strength to hold Jesse’s arm steady so Angela can quickly overlap the loose skin and wrap it all up. 

“Go check on Ana,” Jack orders, as he starts to unsnap Jesse’s restraints. Jesse is silent now, moving where Jack puts him like an unresisting doll. Jack finds clothing shoved in a corner that he gets on Jesse the best he can, and he’s getting Jesse’s good arm slung over his shoulder as Angela and Ana reappear.

Angela is binding up Ana’s wrist, which appears broken. 

“Moira?”

Ana smiles, blood in her teeth, and Jack can see a still red figure on the floor far behind her. “We’ve got six minutes, people. Go, go, go!”

-x-x-x-x-x-

_ Healing takes time, _ Ana tells him, and Angela says the same thing. 

It doesn’t matter how much they say it, it’s not changing the fact that Jack is living with a ghost. Jesse’s wounds heal, certainly, but he drifts from room to room in the small safehouse Jack has commandeered as home base like he’s half-unconscious.

Sombra calls up someone she knows, gets them to make Jesse a striking prosthetic arm, something that looks like it could have been part of his old Deadlock bike. Jesse’s polite enough about it, but as soon as Sombra is gone it gets left on its charger next to Jack’s rifle, the next best thing to forgotten.

Everything seems to be teetering on a precipice, tilting neither this way nor that.

Talon is gone but Gabriel is in the wind. He and Ana and Overwatch - who they are reluctantly in contact with now - keep their ears to the ground but there’s no sign of him. All the Talon-related groups, Los Muertos and Null Sector down to the smallest gangs, are all keeping their heads down. 

It’s what Jack thinks of as ‘suspiciously quiet’. 

As a result he’s been given Jesse-sitting duty, as Ana claims there isn’t anything better for him to spend his time on now. Jack supposes she’s right.

It’s just that every time Jack looks at Jesse, he sees a string of failures that started with his own idea and ended with a broken shell of a man. 

Jesse, for his part, just keeps drifting. He won’t talk to anyone or touch anyone, just looks out the window and sleeps with all the lights on, startling at anything black. 

Out of sheer boredom Jack starts to talk to Jesse even though he knows he won’t talk back. Minor shit about the weather, major shit like how Ana and Fareeha aren’t magically getting along, rambling about whatever book he’s been reading because there’s fuckall to do in a tiny house in semi-rural Scotland. 

Jack gets into his cups one day, finds the bottle of whisky that Ana had tried to hide deep in a cupboard. He doesn’t realize he’s talking at first, it’s been such a habit to talk to Jesse now. Doesn’t realize it’s devolved into apologies, the way that Commander Jack Morrison and certainly Soldier 76 never lets himself apologize because it’s his job to make hard decisions and deal with worse outcomes and not look back. 

But right now it’s just Jack and whisky and a ghost, and so he talks and talks and doesn’t realize that Jesse sits next to him.

He eventually passes out when the bottle and his voice are gone, but it’s all right because very carefully, very gently, Jesse leans his head over and presses his cheek to Jack’s shoulder and closes his eyes.

In the morning, Jesse speaks.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thereweregiants)


End file.
